MiniMax’s CEO won’t take a salary until AGI. His company just raised $2bn after an 80% crash
MiniMax’s CEO won’t take a salary until AGI. His company just raised $2bn after an 80% crash

The letter reads like a founder’s article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story. The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, Mi…

A 23-year-old’s AI startup wants a $20bn valuation, months after a breach cost it Meta
A 23-year-old’s AI startup wants a $20bn valuation, months after a breach cost it Meta

A three-year-old startup run by a 23-year-old is in talks to double its worth to $20bn. The numbers are dazzling. Read the footnotes. Mercor, the AI training marketplace, has told investors it can raise at a $20bn valuation. It says it already holds at…

Anthropic is now worth $1.2 trillion on paper. Almost nobody can buy in
Anthropic is now worth $1.2 trillion on paper. Almost nobody can buy in

Anthropic is the hottest stock in private tech. It is also one of the hardest to buy, and that is exactly why the price keeps climbing. Shares in Anthropic are changing hands on secondary markets at an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion, Business Insid…

UK shops are about to get a four-second line to the police, powered by your face
UK shops are about to get a four-second line to the police, powered by your face

Walk into a shop with the wrong face on file, and the police could know within four seconds. That is the pitch, and the problem. A facial recognition system in more than 100 UK shops is about to start calling the police in real time. It will fire the m…

The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants
The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants

Three Chinese tech giants are on a US military blacklist. All three can still buy America’s best AI, as long as they buy it in the right country. Three of China’s biggest technology companies sit on a US military blacklist. All three can still reach so…

You can now check if a Google ad was made using AI

Google is adding an AI transparency label to ads on Search, YouTube, and Discover, letting you check if an ad was made with generative AI.

Nanya plans a $6bn spending surge in 2027 to ride the AI memory boom
Nanya plans a $6bn spending surge in 2027 to ride the AI memory boom

Nanya Technology spent years as the also-ran of the memory business, the Taiwanese DRAM maker that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron never had to worry about much. The AI boom has changed the arithmetic. The company now plans to spend around $6bn in 2027 as…

Home robots can already walk. The hard part is stopping them from crushing your glassware

1X’s NEO home robot has tendon-driven hands with tactile sensing, force control, and water resistance, but impressive hardware still needs reliable autonomy before it can handle everyday chores.

Claude can now tell you that you use Claude too much
Claude can now tell you that you use Claude too much

Anthropic has built a feature that does something odd for a tech company. It counts how much you lean on its product, then gently suggests you might want to lean a little less. The feature is called Reflect, and it landed in beta on Thursday. It is a d…

Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time
Humanoid robots just removed organs from live animals for the first time

Two robots that look roughly like people just reached inside a live animal and removed an organ. No film studio staged the scene. It happened in a lab in California, and it is a first for medicine. Surgeons at the University of California San Diego use…